Conviction

For a few moments, I gazed at the night skies where the last flames of the shuttle that was supposed to take my sect members to safety slowly died out.

Pain, it started slow, then it began roiling and coiling around and withing me, like a writhing snake.

The sky took its darker sheet and the explosion seemed like it had never happened in the first place.

The pain began increasing, suffocating me enough that I tried to speak but nothing but incomprehensible words came out, I felt like my whole body was going to burst from this pain, and feeling of utter complete frustration and inability to change an outcome that had just happened. 

Suddenly I felt like I was numbed to the world in an instant.

The pain was gone… no, it was still there, muffled and in the background.

The world, for me, all of it, turned gray in an instant, I felt detached, unable to comprehend what just happened.